Few would dispute that Hong Kong prospered as a global hub during the Cold War era. Yet seldom do we focus on this British colony at the doorstep of mainland China as a linchpin of Sino-American connections.Footnote 1 In his first monograph, Peter E. Hamilton reminds us of the critical role the city served in fashioning transpacific networks against the backdrop of the global dynamics during the Cold War. Made in Hong Kong tells more than just the story of Hong Kong; it explains the making of a global network in which Hong Kong functioned as a nexus.
Foregrounding the networks and strategies of mobile and pragmatic operators whom Hamilton calls kuashang (straddling merchants), this book explores a social ecosystem that not only weaved Hong Kong into a global network but also underwrote the city's economic and political transformations. Underscoring the American social capital of these Hong Kong elites, Hamilton directs our attention away from the oft-rehearsed Sino-British interactions as he reveals the criticality of American participation in Hong Kong's development during the last decades of British colonial rule. Hamilton cites Denis Bray, secretary for home affairs, in his address to the American Chamber of Commerce in 1983: “Constitutionally it is Britain which is responsible for administration here. Economically it is America which is the more significant” (p. 159). Capitalizing on the flows of information, capital, and technology through this Cold War frontier, certain enterprising Hong Kong people “pivoted away from British imperial systems and instead engaged with US international power structures through transpacific circulation” (p. 2). Through commercial maneuvers and educational activities, these elite families in Hong Kong furthered their social and economic interests in a process that facilitated China's connection with, and eventually reintegration into, a US-led capitalist global system, Hamilton explains.
Meticulously researched through Hamilton's careful study of multilingual sources not merely at national archives but at libraries and depositories in the United States, United Kingdom, China, and Hong Kong, Made in Hong Kong explains kuashang's multigenerational accumulation of social capital. Hamilton traces these elite families to their prewar roots in the mainland, follows them to their networking endeavors at US universities, and explains their resourceful deployment of their transnational connections in Hong Kong.
Hamilton provides an essential intervention in our understanding of Hong Kong's development by reorienting our focus to the city's transpacific ties to the United States. Cautioning against Hong Kongers’ self-perception as “simply ‘international,’” the book explores in detail the economic development of Hong Kong, which Hamilton calls “contingent, unsustainable, and grossly unfair” (p. 25). Critical to the city's phenomenal success was kuashang's stratagem to construct US connections, especially through higher education.
Hamilton understands education as a means to acquire “cross-cultural social capital that could be reliably converted into economic capital.” Perhaps its impact is most noticeable when a well-positioned family undertakes this endeavor through multiple generations (p. 19). The fascinating account of US involvement in establishing Chinese University of Hong Kong and other tertiary educational institutions in the city points to widening opportunities of upward mobility for the average Hong Kong resident, but the cultivation of such transnational social capital seems to have remained largely the prerogative of the upper crust.
The role of the United States in Hong Kong's development is unmistakable in Hamilton's account. It should be understandable that the city's residents, past or present, seem oblivious to backroom politics and businesses that involved the United States. The United States was conspicuously absent at seismic junctures of Sino-British negotiations over the future of Hong Kong, even though unwavering US sponsorship was arguably more vital to Hong Kong's prosperity than extended British participation. Britain provided a special partner whose continued rule of Hong Kong served as “a convenient placeholder beneath which kuashang strategies of collaboration with US imperial systems could thrive” (p. 14). How uniquely oblique and opaque was US participation in the Cold War frontier of Hong Kong during successive rounds of geopolitical shifts? Even with its flagging power, Britain appeared to have played an indispensable part in the process.
US (or US-style) education seems significant not only for acculturation to American knowledge systems (especially in business, science, and technology) that proved indispensable to Hong Kong's economic growth. Kuashang's US experience also proved instrumental to their success, and by extension Hong Kong's, because of the social connections it engendered. Would it be fruitful to situate these connections US education facilitates alongside enduring Hong Kong interests in grooming UK-styled “gentlemanly capitalists” at Oxford and Cambridge? Despite the predominance of US influence, Hong Kong's “international” posture remained multifaceted.
This is an important book that will be of use to scholars and students in political science, Chinese history, colonial studies, and economic history. The adroit operation of the movers and shakers in Hong Kong pivoted the city away from a waning empire to the US-led system. In the closing years of colonial Hong Kong, the various parties sidestepped what had appeared impossible hurdles (in particular, June Fourth) and orchestrated a relatively seamless transition in 1997 by deploying kuashang resources, such as the networks of the Tung family, from which hailed the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region's first chief executive. Could the city continue to count on such “state-private networks,” especially along a Sino-US axis, for sustained economic growth? Or has the accrual of benefits to the select few so strained the system that this politico-economic configuration has lost its efficacy? The lessons from Made in Hong Kong remain instructive today as the city needs to charter a course forward in the world of Chinese ascendency and continued US dominance.
